Welcome! My name is Val Burge of Sydney,
NSW, Australia. This is the index to a history of both sides of my family
tree - or as a friend said about it recently, my family 'forest'.

It's about where they came from in Britain,
who their ancestors were, their occupations, daily lives, some of their
joys and tragedies, when and how they came to Australia, and what happened
after that. The earliest I've managed to go back so far is to 1612 - but
I'm working on it!

I began my research in about 1992. At that
time my father Lindsay Burge (since deceased) had already spent considerable
time corresponding with various people in England, then searching records
offices and parish records in Somerset whenever his travels took him near
there. He was researching the Burges, so I focused on the McLeans. Since
his death, I've taken on the whole family. It went slowly for ten years
or so, but now the internet has taken off in a big way for researchers
of family history, and my knowledge has grown enormously over the past
few years. My current family history covers thousands of names, a dozen
or so major family lines, and many smaller 'offshoots' to the main family
tree.

This began as simple curiosity, but for
me turned into a labour of love, a way of knowing who I belong to. I'll
never forget the moment, as an adult, standing in the middle of a cemetery
surrounded by dozens of family graves, and knowing at last that I belonged.
As a youngest child of a very much youngest child, I'd never had the opportunity
to know even my grandparents, let alone any of their families. My father
moved away from the village where my family settled in Australia when I
was a young child, so I had all ties broken with my roots. I know them
now!

This site is slowly growing, I'm working
my way through the ancestors of four sets of great grandparents and their
descendants - adding pages as the mood takes me.

Before Redbank, Lancefield, Ballarat, Geelong
and the Barossa Valley in Australia, the major geographical areas are Frome,
Whatley and Batheaston in Somerset, Dilton Marsh, Corsley and Corsham in
Wiltshire, Peckham in London, Horsham in Sussex, Brown Candover in Hampshire,
Dry Drayton in Cambridgeshire, Patshull, Albrighton, Beckbury, and Chelmarsh
in Shropshire, Pattingham in Staffordshire, Ilfracombe and Berrynarbour
in Devon - and a great great uncles line of the family in Mespotamia, Ohio,
USA.

The Scots line are from the tiny isle of
Taransay, in the Outer Hebrides and Fort William, both in Invernesshire.

I also have quite a few pages of early
photographs of my families in Australia, as well as feature pages on some
areas - see links below.

The people in my family are all ordinary
people (with the possible exception of one who appears to have had a brush
with royalty :-) See the Burge's in Batheaston!) I'm not writing out of
a sense of enormous pride in an outstanding family, I'm not writing about
anything out of the ordinary at all... The lives in these pages stand out
purely by their ordinariness, it is the ordinary that's not recorded in
history, the obscure that is lost. Many of these people have almost become
lost to the world in general, and my direct family had no knowledge of
most of them at all. It's a delight to me to put them all into one place,
to have them available to my childen and those of my brothers, sister and
many, many cousins... and all of my cousins were lost up until I
started researching. Through researching these pages, I have come into
contact with 'lost' family in Australia, but also in England, Wales, Scotland,
Canada, America and New Zealand. Truly a worthy enterprise!

Main Pages

May be accessed using the links below...
or use links at the bottom of each page to go on to the next generation

Sorry, those without links are coming soon...
If you have any questions about them, please feel free to emailme.

Many have what are probably extended families
of my ancestors - worth a look if you have a family member with the same
surname at the right time and place etc. The more people I find out I'm
related to the happier I'll be! Please let me know if you find your family
on the 'extra' pages, and see if we can work out a connection...

(Dates listed are a
guide only to their era, dates of birth of the first of the couple
born and death date of the last to die - full details on the relevant page)